One of the major do-it-yourself improvement which homeowners make in their homes is the construction of exterior decks, which serve as outside entertainment centers, swimming pool extensions, child play areas and the like. Such decks are generally elevated above the ground level and, for both safety and compliance with local building codes, these elevated structures require guard rails located from two to three feet above the deck surface. While it is possible to construct such deck guard rails by wood-to-wood construction utilizing vertical posts bolted or otherwise secured to both the deck and the upper rail, it is a complicated, time consuming, difficult task to construct such a rail which is neither unsightly nor unsafe.
The prior art has proposed metal brackets for interconnecting a guard rail post to the deck. One such prior art structure is illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 4,081,940, wherein a metal post of rectangular tubular construction simply has supporting plates welded to its remote ends for abutting contact with a deck support element at one extremity and to the guard rail structure at the other extremity. Such metal post assemblies are expensive, detract from the wooden appearance of the deck, come in limited lengths only, and rely for safety solely upon the integrity of the welded connections. An alternative bracket structure in the prior art consists simply of a "U"-shaped sheet metal bracket which is attached to the post adjacent its lower extremity and which has a metal tang or tongue which projects inwardly to be secured to the upper surface of the deck by screws or nails. This type of bracket imparts no lateral stability to the post, since the tang or tongue is completely within the confines of the post itself, there is no connection of the post to the deck structure other than through the tang or tongue, a direct connection to a structural member of the deck can be accomplished only by drilling completely through the post and the structural component and installing elongated bolts, and this type of bracket cannot be used to connect the post with the rail structure.
There does exist in the art of wooden deck construction a need for a simple, inexpensive bracket useful for inter-connecting a support post to either the deck structure or the guard rail structure and which is both structurally sound and adaptable to both metal and wooden posts.